For many local actors, making two movies a year is nothing out of the ordinary. But for veteran television star Bowie Lam Bo-yee, being part of two back-to-back films - Dante Lam Chiu-yin's The Sniper (which was released earlier this month) and Wong Jing's I Corrupt All Cops (opening today) - is a major break from routine.
The 43-year-old (right) has acted in only one film in the past decade, the title of which he says he can't even recollect (the 2004 movie Unknown, in which Lam plays a psychopath, was a highly forgettable, low-budget mainland film).
Today, well known for his performances in several TVB series such as courtroom drama File of Justice, the ER-like Healing Hands and costume drama War and Beauty, Lam says working on The Sniper and I Corrupt All Cops was enjoyable and refreshing but not that different from his experience in TV.
'A Beijing director once asked me what I'd prefer to do, movies or television,' he says. 'I told him I don't really look at it like that. The most important thing is the script.
'The only difference between the two, however, is the way you work - in television it's a drawn-out process, where you work tirelessly for a long period of time. In films, you are in one scene a day. It provides actors with enough time to recuperate. But doing television is great training. You have to get used to remembering your part and discarding it when you are finished with it. You are put through this mill in which you have to come up with a lot in the shortest time.'
Bowie Lam's ability to juggle multiple personalities was put to good use last year when he worked simultaneously on The Sniper and TV series The Gem of Life. In The Sniper, he plays an amicable and upstanding senior police marksman caught between two feuding colleagues; in The Gem of Life, he's 'a moneyed thug', an uncouth businessman who's not averse to bending rules to get what he wants.
Lam's role in I Corrupt All Cops is, again, in stark contrast to the character he plays in the RTHK series ICAC Investigation 2009, which will be screened on local terrestrial TV in July. In Wong's crime drama, set in the 1970s, Lam plays the sharp-suited, impassioned leader of the newly-founded Independent Commission Against Corruption's (ICAC) operations unit, but in one episode of the TV series, directed by Dante Lam (The Beast Stalker), he plays an entrepreneur who bribes his way to success.